Welcome to Volume 7 Number 2 of the Journal of International and Global Studies. We continue to increase our subscriptions to this free open access online interdisciplinary journal. If you would like to subscribe to the journal, just click on the tab at the top of the page below the journal title. We will be sure to send you the web link to the journal so that you can read and download the essays in accordance with your interests. You will also provide us with a database so that we can draw on your expertise for peer reviewing essays for the journal.

This Spring 2016 issue features three essays from a variety of different disciplines, two Review Essays, and 25 book reviews on globalization topics (defined broadly), a predominant theme of the journal.

The lead essay by Andrés Dapuez, Sabrina Gavigan, and Talita Eger discusses the potential for a “post-neo-liberal” turn in three Latin American countries: Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. They analyze the conditional cash transfers (CCTs) that have been implemented through Mexico’s Progresa-Oportunidades, Brazil’s Programa Bolsa Familia (PBF), and Argentina’s Asignacion Universal por Hijo (AUH). The goals of these programs are aimed at the alleviation of poverty and to the creation of citizens who will be less reliant on state services. Despite these stated goals, the authors argue that these programs with their monetarist policies are a continuation of the neoliberal capitalist policies. Instead of protecting the poor from the vagaries of the market, the CCTs provide poor families with insufficient funds for basic subsistence and in effect have marginalized these people as they have been pushed into an idealized neoliberal market. The authors’ analysis of the stated and unstated goals of these programs demonstrates that the CCTs monetarist policies appear to promise a post-neo-liberal deal providing mothers and children with better economic opportunities, but in actuality it results in more circumscribed economic difficulties. These programs tend to undermine the state’s responsibilities to the poor and instead of declines in poverty, it results in more difficult economic circumstances.

The second essay by Alberto Nicotra and Fay Patel assesses how higher education institutions around the world have been initiating programs for developing more globallyoriented citizens. Universities and colleges have been implementing new curricula that embeds graduate outcomes into its programs in order to create ideal global citizens. The authors discuss how the global political economy of higher education promotes a corporate agenda in its attempts to internationalize their programs. This agenda involves a commercialization of higher education and a ‘colonial’ or imperial style of internationalization that undermines the production of a good global citizen. The authors suggest a more inclusive pattern for the internationalization of higher education based on glocalization---a reciprocity between the global and the local---with glocal stakeholders nurturing an enhanced moral policy for the creation of productive global citizens. The authors utilize the narrative of Nicotra’s experience as a doctoral graduate in order to illustrate the issues of global education and its problems. In addition, they recommend Actor Network Theory as a methodology to understand and assess more qualitybased global education projects that integrate regional advantages, labor, and international mobility.

The third essay by Priya Kapoor, Adam Testerman, and Alex Brehm investigates the local media coverage of a case of entrapment in Portland, Oregon. The authors use critical discourse analysis of two local newspapers that covered the arrest and trial of a Somali immigrant, Mohamed Osman Mohamud. He was accused of intending to use a weapon of mass destruction during a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in downtown Portland in 2010. As a result of some communications over the internet with some terrorist contacts, FBI agents recruited Mohamud to carry out a bombing. His defense attorneys maintained that this was a case of FBI entrapment. The authors connect this case of entrapment to the governmental, political, media, and military security discourses that followed the tragedy of 9/11 and the Global War on Terror. In their critical discourse analysis they draw on Lauren Berlant’s explication of cultural and global citizenship, Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism, and Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer and other relevant writings on the security state. Their discourse analysis of the local media draws attention to the difficulties of a judicial system dealing with issues that have anything to do with homegrown terrorism and Muslim immigrants in the context of the Global War on Terror.

Nima Baghdadi from the Department of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University authors a review essay on two new editions of Routledge titles dealing with Saudi Arabia. Both books are very relevant for understanding the contemporary political and religious developments of Saudi Arabia. Charmaine Misalucha-Willoughby in the International Studies Department at De La Salle University in Manila reviews three Routledge titles focusing on biopolitics and world politics, postcolonialism in late modernity, and modern war and the ideology of violence.

As in the past, we have a number of book reviews for those scholars who have an interest in interdisciplinary research and in globalization and its consequences throughout the world. Again, as we stated in our first issue of the journal, we intend to maintain this standard of generalized interdisciplinary readability for all of our essays and book reviews in future issues of our journal. We hope that you will subscribe to our journal to read future essays, review essays, and book reviews. We also invite you to submit essays, review essays, book reviews, and suggest possible book reviews for the journal.

Sincerely,

Raymond Scupin, PhD Director: Center for International and Global Studies Professor of Anthropology and International Studies Lindenwood University Email: [email protected]